How Victor Glover Became the First Black American to Travel to the Moon's Vicinity

Victor Glover is the first Black American to travel to lunar distances. Here is his biography, what this milestone means, and what he said when Orion passed behind the moon.

The history of Black Americans in space is specific and must be stated to be understood. NASA employed Black engineers and mathematicians from its earliest days — the story told in 'Hidden Figures' of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson is both a tribute to individual excellence and an indictment of the institutional racism that surrounded it. The first Black American in space was Guion Bluford, who flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. The first Black female astronaut was Mae Jemison, in 1992. The succession of Black NASA astronauts since then has been real but never numerically large.

Victor Glover joined NASA's astronaut corps in 2013 after a career as a Navy fighter pilot and test pilot — the traditional pathway to astronaut selection. His assignment to the Artemis II crew reflects both his own qualifications and NASA's specific intention that the programme that returns humans to lunar vicinity should make its crew selection part of the historical statement the programme makes.

Glover's 2020-21 ISS mission — a six-month stay during which he was the first Black astronaut to serve as a permanent crew member of the station — was already a milestone. The Artemis II mission is a larger one: the furthest any human of African descent has traveled from Earth, in a mission that takes him to distances not reached since the final Apollo flight in 1972.

His communication from behind the moon — 'We just went behind the moon. I'm going to need a minute to process that.' — has the specific quality of authentic human response under circumstances that no training protocol fully prepares for. It will be quoted in histories of the Artemis programme. It will be quoted in histories of Black Americans in space. Most importantly, it will be watched by children who will remember having seen it when they are deciding what they want to do with their lives.